Digging Up Milton by Jennifer Wallace (review)

On Tuesday, August 3, 1790, nearly 116 years after the death of John Milton, the poet’s coffin was unearthed from beneath the paving stones in the nave of St. Giles Cripplegate Church. By Wednesday morning the lead coffin had been pried open and looted of hair, teeth, a leg bone, and a jawbone—not of a Samsonian ass but of a poet (our ancestors’ stomachs, apparently, were stronger than our own). Twice in his poetry, in “Lycidas” (57–63) and Paradise Lost (7.34–38), Milton darkly identifies with Orpheus, though hoping to ward off the Orphic fate of being torn apart. In Paradise Lost, he writes presciently of

that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears To rapture, till the savage clamor drowned Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend Her son.

I have often wished retrospectively, in line with Milton’s prospective wish, that his body had been left to rest in peace. I am ambivalent about whether Jennifer Wallace would have done better to resist digging up the story of Milton’s dismemberment as the premise of a historical novel. To say it is an academic’s novel is both accurate (she is director of studies in English at Peterhouse, Cambridge) and faint praise. At moments, the novel leans more to Horatian utile than dulce. (But I should add that, an academic myself, I could not have pulled off the project nearly as well.)

In twelve chapters, each prefaced by a passage from the same numbered book of Paradise Lost, Wallace tells the story through the voice of Lizzie Grant, orphan and then wife of a legal clerk. It is a morality tale of peasant virtue and venality, upper-class pretension and hypocrisy, ambiguous crime, and nagging guilt. If the main plot and characters can be wooden, fully imagined characters inhabit the margins, including the cunning and gullible tavern keeper Benjamin Fountain and the humane shopkeeper Mr. Laming, whom we last see in the hell of Bedlam Hospital. While there is a disconcerting gap between Lizzie’s narrating voice (“He is not the most effusive of gentlemen”; “If she could but guess the real reason for my discomfiture”) and her humble origins and lack of education, a brief and surprising epilogue both addresses this apparent lapse and lends the novel a welcome if regrettably belated depth. This little fiction will please lovers of early modern literature, but they are unlikely to confuse it with literary fiction.